The present invention relates generally to a method and system for accessing information in remote hosts and more particularly a system for utilizing a user interface to access remote Hosts.
The prevalence of the Internet in the arena of desktop computing and desktop operating systems has resulted in everyday use of utilities like File Transfer Protocol (FTP)-based tools that Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) enables. However using existing FTP-based utilities means that the user has to make a mental context-switch between operating within the metaphor presented by the Desktop user interface, and that of the utility.
A representative conventional method of addressing this issue is FTP-PM, which is an OS/2 Presentation Manager based utility for FTP. However, it does not allow drag drop operations between the application and the desktop, nor does it attempt to represent itself as an extension of the desktop user interface metaphor. It shows files on the remote host as names in a list box. It still requires the user to make a context switch between using the desktop user interface and the utility. Accordingly, the user must leave the desktop user interface metaphor of drag/drop, context menus, folders, etc., and must resort to the command line to use FTP, or drop down to a PM application that wraps operation provided by the FTP command line. In addition, conventional methods for FTP user interfaces do not integrate with the Desktop user interface, and therefore do not offer as many operations and settings to the user as does the present invention.
In most systems in which there is access to a remote FTP host, there is typically very little consistency between the different operating systems running on the remote hosts. As has been above mentioned in these arrangements, a command line has to be opened, a password has to be provided, and a significant amount of knowledge of the file system of the particular host has to be known before a user can adequately access the data in such a system.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for providing a user interface in which a consistent metaphor can be used to access data within heterogeneous remote FTP hosts. Such a system should be easy to use, and should be transparent in operation to the user. The present invention addresses such a need.
The present invention provides a method and system for utilizing an operating system""s desktop user interface to access programs and data residing on remote hosts which make use of different file systems and operating systems. The present invention is intended to eliminate the context switch between user interface metaphors when users want to utilize FTP and its associated file transfer functionality.
A method and system in accordance with the present invention for allowing access to a remote host using a user interface of a processing system comprises identifying a plurality of programming interface operations for the remote host and then mapping the user interface code to the programming interface operations to allow for the user interface to be utilized when accessing the remote host.
The system and method in accordance with the present invention maps the FTP command line operations to menu-driven or direct manipulation operations on and between objects that are already present in a user interface metaphor of the desktop operating system. In so doing, an FTP host""s file system and its contents appear to be an extension of the computer system and its user interface an extension of the desktop user interface. The present invention provides a new type of object within a computer called an FTP Host Folder. An FTP Host folder can be created to access a remote FTP site, to view files at that FTP site, to navigate directories at that site, to transfer files between the local machine and the remote host, or to transfer files directly between two remote hosts. In a preferred embodiment, low level FTP operations such as login, cd, get, put, mget, mput, ASCII, binary, etc., have been mapped to operations of the already defined Desktop User Interface. For example, in the Workplace Shell on the OS/2 operating system, the FTP operations have been mapped to menu-driven or direct manipulation operations of the FTP Host folder objects.